Todd Biske: Outside the Box

At the upcoming Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, I’ll be part of a panel discussion on funding SOA. I’ve previously posted on this in this entry, but I thought I’d bring it up again with the upcoming conference.

I’m very interested in hearing the experience of others on this topic. While there’s a lot of discussion about funding models, I still have yet to run into an organization that has had to actually implement one of these models. More often than not, I’ve seen one of two things:

1. A program of large enough scale where a number of services will be created with some in use by more than one consumer
2. Project-level SOA where a single project develops both the consumer and the service

There’s nothing wrong with either of these, but the thing to note is that these efforts did not require any change to the way funding of IT efforts occurs.

In discussing this with some colleagues, it seems that changes in how projects are funded really only comes about when reuse gets involved. In many ways, I feel that it is no different than dealing with shared (reused) infrastructure except that it is a bit more difficult to figure out how to partition the responsibilities.

A key question in all of this is how many services will be reused? If only 5% or 10% of services are reused, it is hard to justify changes to the funding model. But is this a chicken versus the egg scenario? Perhaps it is the way IT projects are defined to begin with which hampers the organization’s ability to identify services with reuse potential.

The point of this is that we’re still in the very early stages of SOA adoption. My sample base is very small, so I’m very interested in whether what I’m seeing is just an artifact of my small sample base, or if SOA funding is still a topic ahead of its time. This topic came up in a recent SOA Consortium call, and in order to reach out to a broader sampling base, I assisted in the development of a survey on the topic. It’s relatively high level and shouldn’t take very long to complete. I, and the other members of the SOA Consortium would certainly appreciate the input. It is intended for corporate SOA practitioners. You can access it here. Thanks!

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